The essential characteristic of the present transformation of
the Japanese urban system is that the system is reorganizing from
a hierarchical urban system to a uni-centred urban
network in which the Capital Tokyo Metropolitan Area is
emerging as the centre for the inter-urban and inter-regional
transactions and communication.

Tokyo has been the capital of the nation since the middle of
the nineteenth century, and has accumulated various urban
functions over the period. It is, however, important to point out
that each region and each major metropolis had maintained
relative functional autonomy and self-sufficiency for a long
time. It is this situation that has been challenged and
manifestly altered by the emergence of the new trends since
1980s. As was pointed out above, innovations in industry and
business and the globalization of the economy played decisive
roles in this fundamental transition. The up-graded production
systems and their accompanying specialized service industries
hastened the rapid accumulation of key urban functions in
relatively few chosen metropolitan areas, especially in the
Capital Tokyo Metropolitan Area, thus creating even greater
concentration.

Table 4.1 shows how fast and to what extent the three major
metropolitan areas have been accumulating some key urban
functions since 1970. Three important trends may be noted.

First, the major functions such as financing, information
technology, and internationalization of business have been highly
concentrated in the three major metropolitan areas.

Second, among the three major areas, the Capital Tokyo
Metropolitan Area has come to dominate in crucial functions such
as financial transactions, international business, and corporate
headquarters, while the second-largest metropolitan area, the
Osaka Metropolitan Area, has been losing ground in the new trend.

Third, as a corollary of the first two trends, the dependence
of the micropolitan areas upon the Capital Tokyo Metropolitan
Area has increased.

The dominance of the Capital Tokyo Metropolitan Area created
two significant movements. The first was the dismantling of the
previous urban hierarchical system, and even small and
medium-sized micropolitan cities and towns began to establish
direct transactional links with the Capital Tokyo Metropolitan
Area, bypassing their regional metropolises, especially in terms
of transportation and communications. Kushiro and Obihiro, for
instance, try to bypass Sapporo, while Kochi and Miyazaki treat
Hiroshima and Fukuoka, respectively, the same way.

The second movement was the acceleration of the outward
expansion movement within the Capital Tokyo Metropolitan Area. In
the latter half of 1980s, it became an undeniable fact that the
Capital Tokyo Metropolitan Area further expanded and annexed
several adjacent prefectures, and it came to cover 11 prefectures
besides Tokyo itself (Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba, Ibaragi, Tochigi,
Gumma, Fukushima, Niigata, Nagano, Yamanashi, and Shizuoka).

In this way, by the late 1980s Tokyo had become a world
mega-city that could no longer be compared with any other major
city in Japan in terms of its scale and complexity. Furthermore,
it is crucially important that Tokyo be analysed, and therefore
properly understood, at different levels of the spatial system,
namely, (1) the anchor city of an expanded Capital Metropolitan
Area, (2) the summit city of a nationwide metropolitan network,
and (3) the key city of a global/international, techno-economic,
transactional network. Therefore, it is easy to understand that
the overwhelming concentration in the Capital Tokyo Metropolitan
Area is, in essence, the direct result of the collapse of
multidimensional functional spaces upon a single geographical
plane, and the intense spatial competition among various urban
functions at different levels.

The emergence of Tokyo as a mega-city does not simply reflect
the rapid growth of one big city, but rather it implies a change
in the total urban and regional system of Japan. The impact of
innovations on industry and business and the globalization of the
economy affected the entire system, with three significant
consequences: (1) competition among various metropolitan areas,
(2) high regional and local functional concentrations, and (3)
the reorientation of micropolitan areas.

First, as the system of three distinguishable major
metropolitan areas disintegrated and the new uni-centred urban
system began to emerge, each metropolitan area, including four
regional core metropolises, came to compete with the others for
further growth and even survival. Osaka and Nagoya could no
longer maintain their national influence, and they tried to link
up with the new system dominated by Tokyo by exploring ways to
differentiate themselves in terms of urban functions and to
establish complementary functions to the Capital Tokyo
Metropolitan Area. Two big national projects, for instance, were
launched in the 1980s in the Osaka Metropolitan Area: one was the
construction of the new international airport in Osaka Bay, and
the other was the Kansai (Osaka Region) Techno-Research Complex
on the hills adjacent to Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara prefectures. All
these efforts were directed at re-establishing the region in the
new urban system in the age of international business and
information technology. Nagoya, the homeland of the Toyota
automobile industry, is trying to redefine its metropolitan
function as high-tech-based design and innovation.

As traffic congestion worsened, Fukuoka and Osaka keenly
competed to establish their status as the second international
gateway, particularly to North-East and South-East Asian
countries. Kitakyushu threatened the distributional functions of
Kobe with respect to international cargo. In short, the key
players try hard to stay in the game, but the rules of the game
have clearly changed.

Second, the intense concentration within the Capital Tokyo
Metropolitan Area has often constituted a national political
issue in urban and regional planning, but even higher
concentration has been developing at each regional and local
level.

Figure 4.2 shows the rate of population increase by city size
during the period 1985-1990. In the major metropolitan areas, as
city size decreases, the rate of population increase goes up.
This implies that in these areas suburban expansion has been
under way. In the provincial or micropolitan areas, in contrast,
the tendency is clearly the opposite. As city size decreases, the
rate of population increase drops sharply. This suggests that the
larger a city is, the faster it grows. In particular, the
regional core metropolises such as Sapporo, Sendai, and Fukuoka
recorded much faster growth than the three major metropolitan
areas.

Fig. 4.2 The
population growth rate by city size, 1985-1990 (Source: 1990
Census)

Furthermore, the increasing importance of administrative and
R&D functions, along with high-tech-based production systems,
attracts more employment and business opportunities to urban
centres at the regional and local levels. Figure 4.3 depicts the
population concentration in the three major metropolitan areas.
Throughout the 1980s, the micropolitan areas experienced absolute
population declines. It is, however, important to note that,
within all these micropolitan areas, the new concentration
occurred at the level of cities and towns. In the period
1980-1990, the prefectural seats grew impressively and
concentrations at the prefectural level became even higher than
those within metropolitan areas (table 4.2). Opinion on the
interpretation of the high and rapid concentration at the
prefectural level is divided. One interpretation is that these
prefectural seats, in fact, put a brake on further depopulation
in their areas; thus they function as a "dam." The
other view, however, maintains that the concentrated population
in prefectural seats often further increases migration to the
regional metropolises and eventually to the Capital Tokyo
Metropolitan Area; thus they function as a "siphon."
Recent statistics indicate that the former interpretation
describes the goal of regional policy intervention but the second
interpretation coincides with reality, more or less. Even Sapporo
- one of the fastest-growing regional cities - is predicted to
begin losing its population when the potential for
intra-prefectural migration is exhausted by the middle of 1990s.

Third, against this backdrop, each micropolitan city and town
is trying urgently to reorient its planning efforts to survive.
The small cities and towns in micropolitan areas used to be a
part of the larger regional unit, but now this hierarchical
system itself has lost ground. Industrial reorganization has
taken away their income-generating industries, and only aged
people, poorly equipped with high technology, are left behind. In
this context, the Fourth National Comprehensive Development Plan
was announced by the National Land Agency in 1987. This made a
radical departure from the previous key policy by stating that
income transfer would replace the growth pole policy in order to
cope with the reality of the situation in the micropolitan areas.
In other words, the industrial relocation policy was unable to
solve the ongoing problems, and each micropolitan area should
take initiatives to establish direct economic links in terms of
transportation and communications to the metropolitan areas, so
that the income flows that are generated in the metropolitan
areas can be adequately circulated in the region. In addition to
this policy framework, regional revitalization programmes were,
in principle, aimed at reorganizing the micropolitan areas on the
basis of their own resources. The key was, and still is, how to
build a low-density society with full access to modern technology
and amenities, in which the principal policy for development must
differ from the policies for a high-density society such as
Tokyo. Tourism and leisure-related industries seem to be one of
the few hopes for these low-density areas, and each micropolitan
city and town is groping for a way out. Despite the vigorous
development efforts in micropolitan areas, the leisure-related
revitalizing "dream" projects suffered a severe setback
when the national economy was struck by recession in the early
1990s.